A while after finishing the imp traveller character, I wanted to give the character some context in a scene. He’s a little fellow only about 40 cm tall, so I needed the scene to give a feel of his small stature, without us looking down as if we’re about to step on him.
About this time I visited some friends out of town and took some photos of roadside weeds and rural mail boxes. This gave me the idea for the composition.
I’d also recently bought the Graswald add-on and was keen to play with it.
I textured up the mail boxes playing with the mask tools add-on. I like the workflow of this for complex layered surfaces
At this stage I was keen to learn the Eevee workflow and explore its capabilities. I also hadn’t been that happy with the skin texture and wanted to redo it.
I baked a pointiness map from cycles, and painted a base colour map using texture painting. The skin texture (pores) is just noise maps.
I could have added a hand-painted specular map to add shine to the oily parts of the skin and used some hand painted textures for the normal or bump map, but I liked the non-realistic look I had going.
Here’s the skin shader:
Then there was a little more work on the road…
Click through for a larger image (which is actually a cycles render)
After this I experimented with compositing this up as a framed image, looking for a story book cover type effect. The monarch butterfly in the border gave the imp something to look at, but I felt the whole thing didn’t quite hang together.
The 3D printed version has now been painted up by the original concept artist and I’ll post some photos when I get a sunny day to pose him outside in the weeds garden.